Sacred Revolutions

Explores the role of the sacred in the response of French intellectuals to the rise of fascism during the 1930s How is it that the most radical cultural iconoclasts of the interwar yearsGeorges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiriscould have responded to the rise of fascism by taking refuge in a "sacred sociology"? This is the question that Michle H. Richman poses in a work that examines this seemingly paradoxical development. Her book traces the overall implications for French social thought of the "ethnographic detour" that began with Durkheims interest in Australian aboriginal religionimplications that reach back to the Revolution of 1789 and forward to the student protests of May 1968. Richman argues that by revising a phenomenon at once as familiar and as exotic as the sacred, these intellectuals forged a point of view relevant to politics, art, and eroticism in the modern period. Assimilating sociology to this revised notion of the sacred, they revitalized a critical discourse based on anthropological thinking dating back to Montaigne and culminating in Rousseau. Her work thus supplies an important chapter in the history of the human sciences while demonstrating the formation of an innovative critical discourse that straddles literary theory, social thought, and religious and cultural studies.